Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Google Kills Search and YouTube in Latest Round of Spring Cleaning

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) – Every spring, to the dismay of many, Google retires several of its underperforming services as part of an initiative called “spring cleaning,” establishing a disturbing trend of axing services that thousands of users depend on. Among famously shuttered features were iGoogle and Google Mini. Other victims have included Google Desktop, Google Notebook, Sidewiki and Aardvark. The company came under fire last year when it announced the demise of Google Reader, the RSS feed aggregator launched in 2005. It also did away with Building Maker and Cloud Connect. On Tuesday, Google continued its belligerent slash-and-burn campaign -- and upped the ante to unprecedented degrees -- by announcing the end of YouTube and, just hours ago, its flagship product Search.

Since the spring cleaning initiative began in 2011 -- an innocuous term for what many people consider technological genocide -- over 70 features have gone the way of the dodo. Google’s leadership claims that these measures are intended to rationalize the company’s offerings to better focus future development efforts. Of course, tech industry experts note that the decisions have more to do with sinking profits than consumer interest.

Google’s products are free; the company thrives on advertising revenue. Services such as Reader and Desktop simply failed to provide platforms conducive to the visibility advertisers require.

But today’s news came as a shock no one could ever have seen coming. CEO Larry Page announced the end of Google Search, scheduled for August 2014, during a melancholy and unscheduled press briefing Tuesday morning.

“In order to generate the billions of dollars we need to operate, ads are mission critical,” Page said. “But integrating too many ads into search results slows down the process, making the results difficult to discern. So that effectively kills the popularity of the search engine. To continue funding the day spas, barber shops, dry cleaners, gourmet kitchens and massage parlors on our campus, we’d have to put so many ads on Google Search that it would take hours to produce a single result. We are therefore unable to keep offering this service.”

Page noted that a simple Facebook search for an old school chum can generate eight times the revenue as the same query on Google.

Programmers will be remanding the proprietary Google algorithms to Microsoft for incorporation into Bing, which changed its appearance this afternoon to mirror Google's iconic brand. Page said he approached Microsoft directly because “Yahoo’s full of punk-ass posers, and I hate them.”